I’d like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.
CLAUDETTE COLVINAs long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.
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I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers.
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We were churchgoing people.
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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.
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When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.
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For African-Americans, it’s still going to be – some people say double hard – I’d say four times as hard. Be an opportunist. Take advantage of your resources, because the only way to win is with education, self-esteem, having value in yourself.
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I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.
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I was ostracized by my community.
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There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.
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When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.
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I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.
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When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.
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I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.
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The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn’t like themselves.
CLAUDETTE COLVIN







